


Of Sea Waves and Starlight (La Petite Sirène)

by catlike



Series: Stardust and Story Books (A Collection of Whouffle and Whouffaldi Fairy Tale Retelling One-Shots) [3]
Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), The Little Mermaid - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Episode: s07e01 Asylum of the Daleks, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fairy Tale Style, Fluff, whouffle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:08:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23707378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catlike/pseuds/catlike
Summary: In the deep blue waters of the open sea, beyond the safety of the shore and beneath a star-filled sky, the Sirens of Skaro reside. They sing their deadly songs and lure sailors into storms, and they do not feel and they do not regret and they certainly, absolutely, positively never rescue any of them.But Clara Oswald, well...the little siren has never been one to follow the rules. So when she sees a man fall from his star-lit ship in a storm, she saves him.She’s just faced with three problems. The first is she can’t speak, lest her deadly siren song slip out to harm him, and the second is she needs to figure out how to help him (and just maybe, possibly, hopefully herself) escape the deadly Dalek Cove without letting him know that she’s actually a siren herself.And the third problem?The third problem is that she just might be falling in love with him.(An Asylum of the Daleks x The Little Mermaid Retelling)
Relationships: Eleventh Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, Eleventh Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor & Clara Oswin Oswald, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Stardust and Story Books (A Collection of Whouffle and Whouffaldi Fairy Tale Retelling One-Shots) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1692124
Comments: 24
Kudos: 91





	Of Sea Waves and Starlight (La Petite Sirène)

The Sirens of Skaro are singing.

And Clara Oswald, crew member of the S.S. Alaska, is drowning. 

The sirens were only a story, the first mate had told Clara mere minutes before the strange and deadly storm started. They were nonsense, he’d scoffed, a nautical fairy tale, mythical and fantastical, fodder for sea shanties to scare off sailors.

But now he’s dead, and the ship is being tossed about and torn apart by the waves summoned by the siren’s song, and Clara is screaming and scrambling, grabbing at nothing as the boards break beneath her feet and she’s plunged into the sea. 

She tries to swim to the surface, but the angry ocean’s filled with tangled seaweed and scattered with falling debris and though she fights and she fights and she _fights_ , she’s still pushed deeper and deeper down into the nothing below.

There’s sea water lining her lungs and a hazy feeling in her head and she thinks that this is it, that she’ll soon be dead, that she joined the ship to see the stars and now she’ll end up drowning instead.

And the thing about Clara is, she’s clever, clever enough to know that she’s in too deep and too far from shore, that fighting is pointless now, so she stops struggling, closes her eyes, and expects to die.

But then...

She _doesn’t_.

Clara thinks that what happens next might be much worse.

Because the sea....the sea is doing something to her. It’s _transforming_ her, and it’s like every cell in her body is being rewritten and rebuilt and reborn. Her legs are searing together, her skin changing into shimmering scales, her feet into a tail, and suddenly in her mind, she knows the tune of a dark and deadly song. And she understands without question what’s happening:

The sea’s turning her into a Siren of Skaro.

“I’m not a siren, I am human,” she gasps out, but even as she does, she knows the process is already half-way done, for how else could she speak underwater? “I’m human. I’m human, _I’m human_ , I’m -“

But it’s too late. There’s saltwater in her veins, a coral reef in her ribcage, and the time of the tides entwined in her mind.

She is Clara Oswald.

And she is a siren.

#

The Sirens of Skaro are drained of love and filled with hate, existing only to exterminate.

But Clara...Clara has always been clever and contrary, stubborn and strong-willed, and so she holds onto her humanity. She hides herself away in the wreckage of her ship, makes it a home away from the rest of the sirens, and when ships sink, she chances outside and scavenges for small treasures and surrounds herself with them: A music box that plays an opera’s aria. A soufflé pan and candelabra. A fork and a whisk and a waterlogged compass that fell off a ship. Things that remind her of the human world.

So she swims and she scavenges, but she never speaks, for she knows that if she does, the siren’s song will slip out, so she stays silent, and as the years pass, she forgets that she even has a voice at all. And as she hides all alone in her half-sunken home, so wrapped up in denial and daydreams, she even forgets about her fins, forgets that she’s no longer human.

And when that deadly siren song rises to the forefront of her mind, pressing against her head, this is what she tells herself:

She was a member of the S.S. Alaska, that was shipwrecked someplace...not nice.

She really likes soufflés.

She is Clara Oswald.

And she is human.

(And the little siren believes it.)

#

Sometimes, on summer nights when the sky is clear and the stars are bright, pale moonlight and starlight will shine down to the bottom of the sea, sifting through the waves and casting dancing silver beams on the sea floor. And that’s where Clara is now, sitting amongst the coral and conch shells, letting the twinkling, celestial rays play over her skin. The wavy starlight shimmers around her, encompassing her, and for a second she thinks that the sea is filled with stars.

And then the stars vanish.

Confused, Clara stares at her empty hand, right at the center of her palm where a tiny, glowing star beam had come to rest just a moment before. But now there’s a darkness over it instead, a shadow replacing the silver, and Clara looks up to see a cloud passing over.

No, not a cloud, she corrects herself.

_A ship._

The little siren pushes up off the sea floor, her hair floating and fanning around her in the water as she swims just a bit closer to the surface, both caution and curiosity warring within her mind.

Ships don’t normally pass in this part of the sea, and never at this time of night. The seafarers are too scared of the legends of the sirens.

(As well they should be.)

But here one is anyway, and from the shadows below, Clara’s brown eyes intensely watch the ship’s dark silhouette, wavy from under the water, and then, just as quickly as it came, it passes by.

The effect is like an eclipse, and all at once, the moonbeams and starlight are back, casting their swaying shadows over her.

Pity she’s no longer interested in them.

Suddenly, the starlight isn’t satisfying the little siren. All that matters is the ship floating up above. It is mesmerizing and mystifying, dangerous and dazzling, and somehow, somewhere deep inside her, Clara feels like she already knows it.

Or maybe it’s just that she wants to know it.

 _Needs_ to know it.

Before she’s even quite sure what she’s doing, she’s surfacing, bursting through the water, just to get a closer look at this ship. The move is reckless, but what she sees leaves her breathless; dazzled and dazed; speechless and spellbound, nearly swept away by the waves.

The ship is the bluest-blue she’s ever seen, brighter than the ocean, darker than the sky, and it’s strewn with starlight, shimmering against the water, casting reflections like flecks of gold. And carved onto its beautiful hull is the name: THE TARDIS.

The glittering, golden glow of the ship bewitches her, utterly transfixes her, and Clara finds herself swimming closer, pressing the palms of her hands against the rough, sea-soaked wood, searching for a ridge or a knot with her fingers, and then when she finds one, she pulls herself up just enough to peer up onto the deck above.

And that’s when she sees the captain. 

He’s got disastrously long limbs and disheveled brown hair and a bow tie around his neck. He’s bent over a map, too absorbed in the green paper mountains and ink blue seas to notice he’s being observed, so Clara stays, watching as he winds his finger along the map, twisting it this way and that, and Clara thinks that if he’s charting out a course, it’s one that certainly doesn’t make any sense. 

And then he starts talking, whispering softly under his breath as he lets his long fingers roam over the map, and Clara glances around the ship, casting about to see if there’s any passengers or crew, but there’s no one, there’s only himself he’s talking to.

He looks ridiculous. Laughable and ludicrous, like he’s a madman who somehow stole the ship, and yet, and yet, and _yet_...

Clara can’t turn away.

There’s something about him that enchants her, entrances her, and instead of sensibly swimming away, she finds herself daring to lean in closer, straining to hear him over the sound of the waves, and she can’t catch every word he says beneath his breath but she thinks he’s talking about nonsense and nebulas, about sand dunes and silver moons, about uncharted skies and unmapped seas.

None of it makes sense.

(Clara clings to every word anyway.)

She’s already recklessly, dangerously close to him, but she’s nearly ready to pull herself closer still and then -

The sound of a dozen voices fills the sky.

Gasping in shock, Clara loses her grip on the ship and drops backwards under the water, her heart pounding in her ears and her mind filled with fear:

The Sirens of Skaro are singing again.

And that means only one thing.

Even below the surface, Clara can already see the storm clouds sweep in like smoke, covering the sky and hiding the stars. And summoned by the siren’s call, the rain starts to fall and the waves start to roll, and it’s only half a heartbeat later that she hears thunder boom and sees lightning light up the sky.

The deadly song carries on and the hateful storm rumbles, reverberating through the waves, and Clara knows the sirens won’t stop until they get what they want - for the captain onboard to be tossed over and drowned. 

And Clara can’t let that happen. 

She will _not_ let that happen.

Quickly, she swims up toward the surface, up toward the storm, running through the odds in her mind and not liking the numbers. There were times - few and far between, but they were there - where ships escaped or survivors were able to row away on lifeboats, slipping out of the storm while the sirens focused on the main shipwreck.

Maybe she can help him escape, she thinks as she tries to break through the rolling, white-crested waves that keep pushing her back under, maybe, if he had a lifeboat, she could push it out of the storm.

Her shipwrecked home rested against an island near a cove that the sirens never went near, and perhaps, she thinks, brainstorming as she swims, she could steer - 

A splash interrupts her thoughts, and she reels back in horror as she sees the Captain drop into the water, half-floating, half-falling, the sea dragging him down.

Determined, she dives down deeper toward him, but the water is dark and it’s hard to see without the stars, so she reaches out for him blindly, her hands fanning out desperately and anxiously, attempting to find him.

She grabs at seaweed and shadows, snatches fistfuls of water until finally, _finally_ , the pads of her fingers brush against tweed. Grabbing hold, she curves her hands into fists and twists her fingers around his coat, using it to tug his body closer to hers.

But then he nearly pulls her down further under as her arms give way at his weight. 

She struggles against the deadweight of his body, her muscles straining, her chest feeling like it wants to fold in and collapse, and it all seems almost hapless, nearly hopeless, but there’s a chant in her head with the rhythm of her heart that screams:

_Save him. Save him. Save him._

So she takes a deep breath and pushes upwards with every ounce of strength she has, pulling him with her. He’s heavy in her arms and her gripping fingers burn like fire, but she won’t let him go, and she won’t stop until she gets to the surface, no matter how many times the burden of his body pushes her backwards, and so she swims and she strains and she swims and she struggles and she _swims_...

And then finally, after what seems like an agonizing eternity, Clara’s breaking through the surface of the water by the island. The cold night air stings her skin and the rough waves splash against her face, but she drags his body to the shore, hauls him halfway up onto the sand -

And then she passes out from sheer exhaustion.

#

When Clara wakes up, she feels sunbeams soaking into her skin instead of seawater, and she sees a clear blue sky undistorted by rippling waves, and she finds that she’s half in the water, half on the shore. There’s gritty sand sticking to her skin and sprinkled in her hair and sweat and dried seaweed stuck on her arms. Then slowly, bit by bit, the memory of the night before comes back to her:

The Sirens and their song, the storm and the star-dusted ship, the captain and - oh.

_The captain._

Clara turns, twisting around in the damp sand to see that he still lies there, stretched out beside her, and carefully, anxiously, she leans over him, hoping and wishing and searching for a sign of life.

Her fingers move over his chest to press above and between the curve of his collarbones, below the hollow of his throat, and she holds her breath, tries to lessen the worried thud of her own heartbeat in her ears as she tries to find his pulse and listens and waits and hopes and then -

There it is, beneath her fingers: A soft and steady beat.

Two soft and steady beats, actually. 

Clara stares down in wonder at the rhythm that beats beneath the pads of her fingers, slides her hand across his skin and counts it again, just to be sure, but there’s no mistaking the sound of his twin heartbeats.

 _Who are you?_ she wonders, curiously and silently, and she edges closer, peering down at him. She hasn’t been this close to anyone, not since the fateful night her ship crashed into the jagged rocks, and before she can stop herself, she finds herself reaching out and brushing a lock of brown hair off his forehead, her fingers resting tenderly against his temple as she studies him, her eyes sweeping over his features, from the height of his cheekbones to the length of his lashes.

And then her hand’s moving again, the pad of her finger tracing the lines of face, over the smooth curve of his lips and along the sharp angle of his jaw. There’s just something about him that captivates her, fascinates her, makes her feel like there’s such a thing as a magnetic pull between beings. And Clara has never believed in fickle things like fate or destiny, but she can’t help feeling that maybe meeting him, _saving_ him, was meant to be. 

It’s as she’s thinking this that he shifts in the sand, and she snatches her hand back, realizing that he’s waking up, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she realizes she should be slipping away, diving down back under the sea, but something keeps her anchored there beside him, wanting to be part of his world. 

His lashes flutter, then his eyes open, and she watches in silence as he stares up at the sky, looking hazy and dazed and half-drowned (which to be fair, he is), and then he turns to his side, spotting her. 

To his credit, he doesn’t jump. Clara doesn’t know whether it’s because he doesn’t startle easily or it’s simply because he doesn’t have the energy to.

(If he saw her scales, he probably would, but as it is, she’s forgotten all about her tail and he can’t see it now, not with the high tide around their waists and the white foam lapping against the edge of their rib cages.)

Clara lifts her hand, gives a wave of her fingers, and the man eyes her. At first, she’s not sure if it’s out of confusion or suspicion, but then she thinks that maybe it’s just out of shock, because he says, “I’m not dead.”

She shakes her head.

He grins then, and it’s warm and giddy and bright and it makes Clara feel like she’s coming to life, “Love it when that happens.”

Clara smiles, turning toward the shore, and brushing her index finger in the sand, she writes, _”You can thank me later.”_

“You saved me?” His eyebrows go up, “How did you do that? It should’ve been impossible.”

” _Long story_ ,” she writes. “ _Is there a word for total screaming genius that sounds modest and a tiny bit sexy?”_

He laughs, “Doctor. You can call me the Doctor.”

She grins, shakes her finger at him. _”I see what you did there. You can call me Clara,”_ she writes. “ _Seeing as that’s my name.“_

His gaze flickers to her face for a moment before replying, and she sees that his eyes are hazel, the softest brown dusted with the palest green, like scattered moss on a tree or the tinted driftwood that floats out in the sea.

“Lost your voice?” he asks.

She nods.

“ _Shipwrecked,”_ she pens in the damp sand, before wiping the word away with the her palm of her hand to make space for a new sentence. “ _Different ship, different storm. Same nasty cause.”_

He studies her, “You do know what the cause was, don’t you?”

_“I know a siren when I hear one.”_

He hums in thought, reaching into his inner coat pocket and pulling out a curious looking copper-colored contraption that shines like the doubloons she’s seen in the sunken treasure chests under the sea. It’s made up of whirling golden gears and copper cogs, and at the very end there’s a bright gem, the color of an emerald, (though Clara’s not sure that that’s what it is, for she’s never seen a jewel that lights up before,) and she watches as the Doctor runs it over the edge of the water, it’s tip glittering bright green and sending it’s glow into the waves, and then he reads it, his lips turning down into a frown.

Pity, Clara thinks idly, he looks so much nicer when he smiles.

“This is a nanosea,” he says, and Clara can practically hear the constant tick, tick, tick of his mind as talks out loud and figures it out. “The microorganisms in the water give the sirens their power, the nanogenes rewriting their bodies and altering their voices and giving them the ability to control the sea. But then how can they call the clouds and control the rain?”

Clara’s already figured it out, years ago, so she reaches down to the sand to spell it out but then she hears him say, “Oh. _Oh._ That’s it, isn’t it?”

She glances back up at him, and finds the oddest expression on his face, like he’s halfway between horrified and delighted.

“They control the water. And water? Water’s everywhere,” he gestures madly about, waving his hands while he talks, and Clara’s reminded of a seagull flapping its wings against the wind. ”It’s in the atmosphere and the clouds and the rain cycle, allowing them to literally summon a storm with a song. Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. Well, no, actually, it’s not, it’s bad,” he amends. ”But it _is_ clever.”

He stares off at the skyline for a second, smiling at something unknown to Clara, before glancing back at her, “But you knew all that already, didn’t you?”

” _There’s not much else to do when you’re shipwrecked_ ,” she writes hastily, fingers flying across the sand like a dance. She used to talk quite fast, back when she was able to speak, and now she’s writing rapid fire sentences out in the sand, nearly faster than the Doctor can read. “ _Figured out the sea right away, holed myself up in the shipwreck on the other side of the island, the siren’s haven’t found me there yet. They hate coming near the shore. Been causing a bit of trouble for them, if you call that a hobby. I don’t, really. Rather be traveling. And do you like soufflés?”_ she’s not quite sure why she wrote that last bit. It just came out.

He laughs, and she decides she likes the sound of it.

“Soufflés?” he asks.

“ _Yes. Soufflés.”_

“I suppose I do.”

She grins. She doesn’t know why this piece of information seems like something important, something precious, but it does.

“What ship were you on when you crashed?” he asks.

“ _The S. S. Alaska,”_ she answers, scrawling out her sentence. “ _I was hired as a singer. Figured it’d be a good way to see the world_.” She smiles wryly, “ _Now I’m stuck here instead. Where were you headed?”_

“Who says I was headed someplace?”

Clara raises an eyebrow at him pointedly, her silence not lessening any of her sass, and then she writes, “ _People are always headed somewhere.”_

He grins down at her sentence, eyes dancing across the words, and then he looks up at her, and he wears a grin that’s both magnetic and electric and Clara finds herself leaning forward toward him as he asks, “Do I look like people?”

She thinks of his starlit ship and the twin heartbeats she felt under his skin and thinks that maybe, maybe, just like her and the sea, he’s also got secrets that lie beneath the surface.

“ _So if you weren’t headed somewhere in particular, what were you doing?”_

“Going anywhere.”

_“Anywhere?”_

He shrugs, “Anywhere and everywhere, and a few places in-between.”

_“Why?”_

“Because, Clara, there’s stars I’ve never seen and seas I’ve never sailed, and there’s so many things to do and places to be, and don’t you want to see it all?”

She does. She thinks she’s never wanted anything so badly, never ached like this ever before, and each beat of her heart echos in time to the thought in her mind that says:

_I want to go, I want to go, I want to go._

She’s seen the reflection of the night sky upon the water, making it look as if she’s swimming in stars. But she’s always beneath the same patch of sky, and she wants to go farther, follow the scattered stars and see them weave into new constellations that lie beyond the line of her cove.

 _“Too bad we’re stuck here,”_ she writes sadly.

“Not for long,”

She glances up at him, sees he’s smiling, his eyes’ sparkling, like he’s a madman forming a plan and she feels her pulse race as she stares at his face.

“ _You’re going to get out of here?”_ she asks.

”Oh, Clara,” he says, and she finds she likes her name on his lips, “with your help, I can get us _both_ out of here.”

And for the first time in a very, very, _very_ long time: 

Clara feels _hope._

#

The next morning, when Clara‘s head rises from the white-crested waves, she brings good news with her.

“ _Your ship’s on the other side of the island, by my own shipwreck_ ,” she writes, so fast and so excitedly that her words blur together and her handwriting ends up all loopy and lopsided. “ _It didn’t sink!”_

“Of course the TARDIS didn’t sink,” the Doctor says, smiling widely. “Anchor set in beautifully. Best ship in the universe, after all. Is it close enough to shore that we could reach it by swimming out to it?”

 _“I definitely could,”_ Clara writes, before giving him a critical once over that lingers a little longer on his silhouette than is (maybe, probably, very likely not) scientifically necessary. _“You probably could.”_

“Hmm, only probably, eh?” he questions, reaching up to straighten his bow tie almost defensively. “And while we’re on the topic, how are you so strong of a swimmer?”

 _”I’m very talented,”_ she writes quickly and flippantly, smiling up at him, before asking, _“How are you going to deal with the sirens? They’re only leaving your ship alone because it’s empty. Once we get on it, they’ll attack again. We’ll never make it out of the cove.”_

Distracted from the swimming question (or maybe, Clara worries, just waiting to circle back to it), the Doctor pulls out the copper whatsit from his pocket, flicking it with his fingers so that the end of it lights up.

”With this,” he says, as Clara peers at it curiously. She saw it once before, but it doesn’t look any less odd now, and it rather reminds her of the glowing fireflies that sometimes float in the jungle she sees from the water. It makes the same pleasant buzzing noise as them too.

Still, it doesn’t seem like anything that can defeat the evil in the sea.

 _“You’re going to save us with a dinglehopper?”_ she writes skeptically.

His eyebrows shoot up, “A _what_?”

Clara waves her fingers dismissively. It’s been so long since she’s had a real conversation that she sometimes forgets the proper human terms.

“ _A doohickey_ ,” she corrects herself. 

The Doctor doesn’t look any more pleased with that term.

“It’s a sonic,” he says, in a scolding sort of tone. “Don’t disrespect the sonic.”

_“I would never disrespect the snarfblatt.”_

“Impossible girl,” the Doctor mutters to himself, half under his breath, while Clara smiles winningly. 

The sonic, he goes on to explain, sounding the word out carefully for her, will gain power from the rays of the sun, and in a few days time, it will be powerful and volatile enough to create an explosion that will destroy the evil nanogenes in the water if they plant it on the sea floor. 

The Doctor rambles excitedly about the science behind it, about sunshine and solar heat, about cogs and springs and fantastical things, and Clara listens, watches the gestures of his hands and the way his eyes light up and then she grins and writes:

“ _Clever boy.”_

He throws his head back and laughs at the nickname, and the smile on his face reminds Clara of when the sun filters in through the water just right and turns the entire world warm and golden and beautiful.

The Doctor’s laughter subsides and he studies her as she studies him back, and then he squints, like he’s trying to see below the gently lapping water and wavy green seaweed that’s washing up on the sand. But the nanosea water is unnaturally, deceptively dark, and he can’t see a single thing under it. 

“Come on land,” he says eventually, eyeing her curiously.

“ _Can’t,_ ” Clara writes. _“I need my diving suit to get in and out of my half-sunken ship and to swim over to the other side of the island without having to cut through the jungle. And my diving suit’s rather stiff and uncomfortable in the sun.”_

“Can’t you take it off?”

Clara stares, raises an eyebrow, then writes, “ _Did you just suggest I take my clothes off, Doctor?”_

He reads her sentence, brows furrowed, looking bewildered, and it takes one, two, three, four seconds for him to replay his sentence in his mind and for his mouth to drop open.

“Oh,” he says, quickly, “no, no, no, I didn’t mean - “

She smirks at him slyly, noticing the faint pink blush that’s blossoming on his cheeks and slipping along his neck, down under the collar of his shirt.

“Clara,” he admonishes, clicking his tongue, making a tsking noise like a scandalized nanny, and shaking his finger at her. “Please.”

But it’s too late, she’s already scrawled out, “ _Didn’t know you were so forward, Doctor. We’ve only just met.“_

“Oh, no, I really didn’t - “

“ _Been alone at sea very long, I take it.”_

He huffs, “I - Shut up.”

_“Technically, I haven’t actually said anything.”_

He looks down to read her message and then immediately looks back up to glare at her.

_“Bad combo. No sense of humor and that chin.”_

“Well, I - oi!” He exclaims suddenly, “What’s wrong with my chin?”

_”Careful, dear, you could poke someone’s eye out.”_

He’s so flustered he doesn’t ever ask about her coming up on land again.

#

The Doctor spends his days on the island, waiting for the sonic to build up strength, and he and Clara talk and they laugh, trading stories while building him a raft. He tells her about his star-woven ship (“It’s bigger on the inside,” he tells her as she stares skeptically, “I swear.”) and how he ran away in the middle of the night to see the world, and hasn’t really stopped running since. And she tells him about operas she’s heard and failed soufflés she’s tried to bake, about how she misses the color of autumn leaves and how, at the very least, there’s one-hundred-and-one places she’d like to see.

She calls him _clever boy_ and he calls her _impossible girl_ , and he’s like her fever dream, a fervent wish, someone she wants but thinks she’ll never get to keep. 

But it’s nice, she thinks, to dream.

It’s what she’s good at.

#

“The sonic will have enough strength to destroy the nanosea soon,“ the Doctor says one evening, studying it from where he’s stuck it straight-up in the sand, the gleaming jewel on top facing up toward the sun. “Maybe in two or three more days.”

But as it is, the sun is setting, it’s light fading, and there’ll be no more charging for it tonight. 

The thought that their hope is tied to the disappearing sun is a sobering thought, and both Clara and the Doctor stare off at the skyline as the sun sinks down into the sea.

Clara turns over her shoulder to look back at the Doctor, and she’s about to ask something logical and practical, relating to their escape plan: if the map she’s drawn of the island for him is good enough; if he thinks he can make it through the jungle to her makeshift, shipwrecked home on the other side of the island; how dangerous the explosion from the sonic will be and how they’ll get it so far down under the sea; but when she looks at him, all her sensible questions are lost. 

Instead, she smiles at the way the light from the sunset reflects off the moving waves and onto his face and paints a pink and gold nebula that floats over his skin, and Clara finds she doesn’t want to ask questions about practicality and plans. She wants to hear about what lies beyond the horizon, about every wild and wondrous place he’s been and things he’s seen, because the idea of the whole world waiting out there for her is exhilarating and intoxicating. 

“ _Tell me about them_ ,” she writes in the sand. 

He reads her words, looks up at her, “Tell you about what?”

“ _All the places you’ve been_ ,” she writes. “ _All the places you still want to go.”_

And so he does. He tells her about the constellations above Calcutta, the colors of the aurora, about the beaches made of glass and the arch at Akhaten’s Pass. He speaks of places she doesn’t know and wonders she’s never seen, and he rambles on happily, gestures madly, stopping only to ask questions he answers himself or to run his hand over her hair when she smiles at him, and then, right before the last bit of light from the sunset leaves the sky, Clara leans over and she writes: 

“ _Will you show me them? Will you take me away with you and show me the stars?”_

His smile’s so bright she can still see it even in the fading light, and in response, he crosses his fingers over his two hearts and says:

“I’ll show you the stars, Clara. I promise.”

And she knows he means it.

#

When Clara rises out of the water the next day, the Doctor’s studying the sonic, ghosting his finger of the star-bright glow at the end, and he says, “Not long now, we should get a good charge in with the sunshine today. How’s the TARDIS?”

Clara rolls her eyes in amusement, lifts some lavender sea shells off the sand, and writes, “ _Your ship’s fine. Good morning, by the by.”_

“Oh,” the Doctor blinks. “Right. Sorry. Good morning, Clara.”

Clara rolls her eyes in amusement, teases, “ _Missed me, then?”_

The Doctor laughs and leans forward, lifts his hands to either side of her face, cupping her cheeks and kissing her forehead.

“Yeah,” he says. “Lots.”

And Clara had meant her question as a joke, but suddenly the situation doesn’t seem so funny anymore, not with the knowledge of how his lips feel brushing over her skin and how the chaste, simple gesture sends her heart fluttering, and Clara knew that she’d fancied him, but now it hits her like lightning that she’s actually in love him. 

Madly, desperately, breathlessly in love with him.

The shock must show on her face, because he frowns, furrows his brow, runs his thumb across the curve of her cheek and asks, “You okay?”

Her breath is hitching and her mind is spinning, there’s a delicate shiver moving down her spine and her heartbeat’s beating out in double-time, and she writes:

_“Wonderful.”_

#

The sky is clear and the stars are bright, and the pale moonlight turns the sand below into a soft white and transforms the softly lapping waves to shades of silver.

Clara’s lying on the rocks on the water, and the Doctor’s back on the beach, and though she can’t see him and he can’t see her, she can hear him, and she smiles up at the sky and he says:

“Just one more night, Clara. Just one more sunrise. Then the sonic will be ready. I’ll pass through the jungle in the morning, to where you said your ship and mine are.”

She can’t speak, and there’s nothing to write with, but still, she thinks, _And then?_

And he must somehow hear her unspoken question. Or maybe it’s just that he knows her by now, because he laughs and says, “And then I’ll show you the stars.”

#

Clara waits in her shipwreck, sifting through her scavenged treasures, trying to see what things she might want to take with her, because today’s the day, the day the Doctor will finally come and whisk her away. The pads of her fingers run over her collection of gadgets and gizmos and thingamabobs, over loose pearls and smoothed over broken pieces of glass bottles and stacks of gold coins. She pauses over a pocket watch and silver locket, but decides against them. There’s a hundred-and-one places to see, and she’s no need for things like these.

”Clara,” she hears the Doctor call, and she spins, peers through the porthole at him, an excited smile on her lips, but it fades as soon as she sees the grim expression on his face as he studies her home and her floating silhouette through the porthole.

Worry whirls around in her mind, and she wants to shove it away or bury it deep so she won’t have to think about it. The look on the Doctor‘s face means that something’s wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, and it can’t be. It just can’t. She joined the S. S. Alaska to see the world and ended up stuck in a shipwreck the first time out, and now is when he’s supposed to sweep her off and show her the stars.

Nothing can be wrong, she tells herself.

(Thoughts start to surface in her mind that something _is_ wrong, that she’s known all along that something was wrong, but she pushes those thoughts away.)

“Clara,” the Doctor says carefully, wading into the water, “I think there’s something you forgot to tell me.”

She stares at him through the algae-dotted porthole, clueless.

“Or maybe,” he continues, his voice is soft, ”there’s something you forgot to tell yourself. Something you’re purposely repressing and denying.”

Something in Clara turns cold, and she shivers, swallows, shakes her head. 

“It’s a dream, Clara,” he tells her, stepping toward the water-filled porthole, pressing the pads of his fingers against the glass. “You dreamed it yourself because the truth was too terrible.”

 _No,_ she thinks. _No. No. No._

“Clara,” he says, gently. “You’re a siren.”

“Human,” she mouths silently, automatically, shaking her head stubbornly.

“You used to be,” he corrects her. “When you were shipwrecked, you fell into the sea a human girl and rose as a Siren of Skaro.”

His words seem as wrong as they are right, and that deadly melody of the sea starts to rise up again in her memory, but Clara curls her fingers into fists, mentally and automatically screaming: _No. No. No._

“You told me what your job was on the ship, remember? You were a singer. Instead of killing you, the nanosea and the sirens _transformed_ you, hoping the force of your voice would be a powerful ally in their deadly songs.”

At his words, Clara shudders and her heartbeat echoes in her ears like thunder, and it’s like she suddenly can’t move or breathe, and she feels like she’s going to shatter, scatter and dissolve into sea foam.

“You haven’t really lost your voice at all, have you?” the Doctor asks quietly. “You’re repressing it because you know if you speak, you’ll hear a siren’s song instead of your own.”

 _No!_ her mind screams back. She’s angry and scared and starting to become aware that she’s breathing underwater in the sunken part of her shipwreck home, that she’s floating in place thanks to the strength of her tail, and so for the first time in years, she opens her mouth and speaks.

“I. Am. Human.” Clara says, slowly, deliberately, but the voice she hears is not her own, and the way her words comes out half screaming, half singing scares her.

“Clara,” the Doctor says. “I’m afraid you haven’t been for a very long time.”

But it can’t be, she thinks, snatches of memories swirling around in her mind like a tsunami. She’s _human_. She joined the S. S. Alaska. She was shipwrecked. She fell into the sea and...

_Oh. Oh no._

The memories are sickening, gut-wrenching and mind-twisting: 

The siren’s haunting song under a rain filled sky. The captain steering the ship right into the rocky crag of Dalek Cove. Her sinking and struggling, drowning and dying, and then: the scales forming over her skin and the deadly melody playing inside her mind and the sudden, insatiable song and the desire to sing and to kill and -

“I’m not a siren,” Clara wails in retaliation, trying to bar out the memories and block out the pain, and she barely even notices the way her cry clouds over the sky, how the waves on the water grow with each one of her words. “I’m human!”

“Clara,” the Doctor shouts in surprise, nearly falling with the way the way she’s making the sea swirl around him. ”Clara, _please_.”

”Human! I’m _human_ ,” she argues, and the wind howls along with her, the rain falling with her tears and the waves raging with her.

They all prove her wrong. 

And that realization breaks over her like a wave upon the shore, and she screams and sings even more, the glass of the porthole shattering, scattering in the whirl of the wind with the force of her voice, the boards of the shipwreck nearly knocking loose.

The Doctor had been right, she had been a singer and her voice was beautiful, so beautiful that the terrible sea had thought the sheer power of it would be worth saving her for, and it hadn’t been wrong.

She sings with the strength of ten sirens combined, and she’s creating a hurricane all on her own, pulling it out of the sky with her cry, spinning it out over the sea in a fit of impossible agony. 

The pain is as unbearable as it is uncontrollable. _You are devastated_ , the sea seems to tell her, _and you will create devastation._

The remains of the ship burst open at the thought, and the Doctor ducks, diving under the water to avoid the debris, and then thunder rolls and lightning strikes, bright and blazing and burning up the sky.

“Clara,” the Doctor shouts above the storm as he surfaces, seawater slipping into his mouth, “Clara, please, you don’t have to do this!”

Oh, but she does, she thinks. She’s a Siren of Skaro after all. He said so himself and now she knows it. She reaches the crescendo of her song, the waves building and rippling, growing higher and higher and higher, because she is Clara Oswald and she...

She is....

_Human._

The thought overwhelms her, breaks her and stops her, and her song comes to a sudden halt, the lyrics fading on her lips, the waves dissolving into a shimmering burst of pale mist, floating through the air like confetti. The thunder falls silent, the sea becomes less violent, and for a moment there’s no sound at all, except for the soft patter of light rain falling into the sea along with her tears.

“The sea wants me to kill you now,” Clara says mournfully, softly, singing under her breath. “I can _feel_ it.”

And, oh, how she can. Now that the dream is destroyed and the barrier in her mind is broken, she can feel the pure hatred of the nanosea and how each tiny ripple and bubble begs:

_Kill him. Kill him. Kill him._

So, so much hatred and rage. But instead of surrendering to it, Clara fights against it, closing her eyes and holding on to whatever humanity she has left, no matter how much the memories hurt.

(And, oh, they hurt. They hurt like she’s dancing on knives.)

The sea stole her life, turned her into a siren, and she’s going to make sure that it won’t do it to anyone else, not ever again.

She swims out to where the Doctor floats, grabs the glowing sonic from his pocket, and asks, “Are you sure this explosion can destroy the nanogenes?” 

He nods, “Yes.”

“And isn’t there a better chance at that the further down it goes?”

He hesitates, treads the water, says, “Yes.”

“Then run,”

He stares at her, bewildered, “What?”

“Run,” Clara says, and, _stars_ , what she wouldn’t give to have two legs and be able to run again. She’ll just have to satisfy herself with the fact that she’s saving him, that she’s saving the lives of thousands of others. That one day, they’ll sing songs of the girl who sacrificed herself to make sure the nanosea never killed anyone else.

“No,” the Doctor says, eyes widening at the realization of what she’s thinking, of what she’s about to do, and he reaches out to stop her, grabbing for her hand in the water, “Clara, don’t!”

But he’s too late, she’s slipped out of his grasp and he can’t change her mind. And it’s not his fault, not really, because even the sea with all it’s power couldn't alter her mind through all the years it spent trying. 

She’s always been stubborn, after all. 

“I am Clara Oswald, I fought the sirens, and I am _human_ ,” she says, like it’s a touchstone or a battle cry, something she lives by, and then she turns, takes one last, long look at the sun and the sky and the lovely shade of his eyes. All the things she’ll never see again.

All the things worth dying for.

And right before she dives, she says:

”Run you clever boy, and remember.”

And then Clara plunges into the water, pushing toward the sea floor, hurling the sonic down to it.

And then there’s a blinding, brilliant flash of light.

And her world fades.

#

Darkness. That’s all there is, all bleak and black, like a starless night sky.

There is no up or down, no left or right, there’s only nothing, and she is nothing, floating nowhere.

Then, slowly, there is a light.

It’s a tiny pinpoint on a dark horizon, like it’s shining from a single star, and Clara is coming to, coughing and sputtering and spitting up water. Her head feels fuzzy and full of fire, and when she breaths it burns, and somewhere in the back of her mind she thinks:

I should be dead, I should be dead, I should be _dead._

But she’s not.

Two strong hands are holding her, gripping her shoulders, before running down her arms and taking her hands, and she’s dimly aware of someone calling her.

“Clara,” the voice says, “Clara, you're alright. You’re safe now, I promise.” 

The words seem like a lie. They have to be. There’s no way she can be safe, she thinks, no way she’s managed to survive.

When she opens her eyes, beads of water cling to her lashes and run down her cheeks like glittering teardrops, and blearily, she makes out the blurry, watery image of the Doctor looking down at her.

He smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and the sight makes Clara want to cry, because if this is just another mirage from her mind, then it’s the cruelest one yet.

“Are you real?” Clara asks. She‘s cautious and suspicious, but _stars_ , she wants this, and she finds herself begging the universe to not let this be just another fantasy. “Actually, properly real?” 

“Yes,” he tells her, and he laughs, tiredly but elatedly, before bringing his hand up to her cheek, the furthest tips of his fingers sliding under her hair and coming to rest on the soft skin below the back of her ear, where she can feel the light pressure of his fingers against the beat of her pulse. And maybe it’s not a dream, after all, Clara thinks, because the warmth from his hand feels real, and so does her heartbeat. “Actually, properly real.”

Clara gasps out a laugh, and the salty sea air is stinging her face and she’s soaked to the bone and her lungs are burning, but she is _alive_ , she is so alive, and it all feels wonderful.

“Clara,” the Doctor says then, and he’s smiling now, “look down.”

She blinks at him, gives the slightest shake of her head. She doesn’t want to see her tail. She’s spent years pretending it wasn’t there, and making eye contact with her shimmering scales isn’t something she wants to do now, even if she is glad she’s not dead.

“Clara, trust me, and look down,” he says, taking her hands in his and gently guiding them down past her hips and she stiffens, braces herself for the feel of cold scales but instead, instead, instead...

She feels _skin._

Her breath catches and her mind spins, and it’s like her thoughts are a broken phonograph record, trying to go around and around but not getting past the same word.

And that word is _legs._

Instead if scales, Clara’s hands are resting on her thighs, half-covered by the shredded remains of her diving suit tunic. And below that are knees and shins, and feet instead of fins, and a pearl of laughter spills out of her lips as she stares down, wiggles her toes just because she _can,_ because she has them. And she’s not sure whether to cry tears of happiness or let out an overjoyed scream, because she’s got legs back, and it seems to good to be true.

 _But it is,_ her pulse sings, _it is true._

“I’m not a siren,” Clara says, testing her voice out, and the voice she hears is her own, free of siren calls, melodic all on its own, and it sounds so glorious after not hearing it for years, and Clara can’t help but let out a joyous laugh again, giddy and breathy and bright. ”I’m _human.”_

The Doctor laughs along with her, “Well, you always said you were.”

“But, how?” Clara asks, finally getting past her initial surprise. She falters on her feet, unused to standing, and the Doctor reaches out to wrap his hands around her waist, steadying her like he’s her anchor, and she grip his arms, fingers tugging at them urgently as she repeats, “Doctor, _how_ do I have legs again?”

“When you refused to kill me and dove in to kill the nanosea instead, you destroyed every nanogene in the water. That included the nanogenes in your body that were holding your transformation together,” the Doctor explains, still holding her steady in more ways than one. “When the explosion happened, the nanogenes all ceased to exist, and you reverted back to the original state you were in when you fell off the S. S. Alaska. Well, plus some bruises and burns from the detonation.”

He lifts her left hand, and she sees a burn mark blossoming against her palm where she’d held the sonic. 

“But bruises and burns are okay,” he says. “And do you know why? Because bruises and burns are _human_.” 

He dips his head down over her hand, the tips of his hair brushing against the inside of her wrist as he presses a gentle kiss against the tender center of her palm. 

“Beautiful, fragile human skin,” he murmurs, but Clara’s thoughts are elsewhere, running a sentence he said over again in her head.

“You said that without the nanogenes, I was reverted back to what my body was when I fell off the S. S. Alaska.”

“Yes.”

“But, Doctor,” Clara says, “I was drowning. I was _dying_. The transformation was what finally allowed me to breathe. And I was at the heart of the explosion just now, miles below and right in the danger zone, and no longer a siren.”

He searches her eyes, as if he’s not sure what her question is.

“I should have drowned,” Clara says, “I should be _dead_. What happened?”

He brings his hand up to her face, brushes her wet hair back out of her eyes and tucks it begins her ear, letting his fingers trail down the skin along slope of her neck and he says, “I dove in after you.”

She swallows, shakes her head in shock, and for the first time, she notices how soaked he is, how his wet shirt is plastered to his skin and his hair is drenched and dripping water down onto his cheekbones, and she knows that he must’ve jumped in after her, but she still doesn’t quite understand why. He’d have had to have swam into the very heart of the explosion, into the violent, volatile waves and dove down to the vicious, dangerous dark waters below to search for her. It’d be nearly a suicide mission. 

“Why?” Clara asks. “Why would you do that?”

He smiles, laughs softly, and says:

“Well, I promised you I’d show you the stars, remember?”

#

He keeps his promise.

His starlit ship takes them anywhere and everywhere, and she sees new patches of the sky and the curve of new constellations, new cities and seas and wonders, and it’s all magical, fantastical, utterly wonderful, and here are the things the little ex-siren likes best:

The sunbeams against her skin and the sand between her toes, the view of the sunrises on the skyline and the shine from the stars and him, him, _him_ , the warmth of his arms and his hands in her hair, the taste of his lips and the sound of his laugh and the fact that this isn’t just a happy ending, it’s also a _beginning_.

And sometimes at night, when she stares up at the sky, surrounded by starlight and awash in moon-glow, she smiles to herself.

Because she is Clara Oswald.

And she is human.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) The Sirens of Skaro are named after the home planet of the Daleks, Skaro, where the episode Asylum of the Daleks mostly takes place. The episode’s dangerous, dna-altering nanocloud was changed to the nanosea, and the soufflé-loving star-shipwrecked junior entertainment manager changed to a soufflé-loving shipwrecked singer. The whisk and the opera and the dialogue from the episode are also scattered throughout the fic.
> 
> 2) Of Sea Waves and Starlight is loosely based more on the original fairy tale than the Disney movie (though there’s references to the movie too). Clara feeling like she’s dancing on knives and is going to turn into sea foam are references to the original, and so is the fic’s climax and ending. In the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, after the prince fails to fall in love with her, the little mermaid is given a knife and told that if she kills the prince, she’ll get to live, but if she doesn’t, she’ll get turned into sea foam. The little mermaid doesn’t kill him, so she throws herself into the sea and becomes foam. Some versions end it there because the rest of the ending was criticized by some people, including other famous writers, but originally, what happens next is she comes back to life as a “daughter of air” thanks to her selflessness at refusing to kill the prince. 
> 
> So, in my version, the sea wants Clara to kill the Doctor, and she refuses and makes the ultimate sacrifice, just like the little mermaid. And then, the Doctor’s able to save her and show her the stars, thus bringing her back as a “daughter of air.”
> 
> ....Okay, not going to lie: I was going to have it end with him sweeping her off to show her the stars anyway, regardless of how the original ended. Which is why most of the time working on this story was spent trying to come up with a clever (or at least coherent) reason why Clara’d be able to have legs at the end.
> 
> 3) When I started this fairy tale retelling series, I wrote down a list of potential fairy tales, and an Asylum of the Daleks x The Little Mermaid version was one of the first ones on the list. That being said, I initially planned to write another Clara x Eleven fairy tale retelling instead. But a passage from this one popped into my head and then I saw a gifset of Jenna Coleman saying that The Little Mermaid is her favorite fairy tale. So it seemed like a sign, and I set aside my other retelling wip to work on this one. 
> 
> 4) I’ve seen some rather...angry discourse about how Oswin should always be considered separate from Clara. But as she says, the soufflé is in the recipe. And, hey, I already mixed up a British sci-fi episode with a classic Danish fairy tale and replaced hateful, screaming robots with hateful, singing sirens. It’s all wibbly-wobbly, writery-wrotery.
> 
> 5) This is the longest fic I’ve written so far. I said, ”Oh, this lighthearted fic will only be about 3,500 words,” and the next thing I know, there’s a tiny bit of emotional stuff being added and the word count is coming in at 8,000+. Oops? 
> 
> 6) There’s more fairy tale retellings coming! This is the third in the series, and hopefully the fourth will be out within the next two months. So remember to subscribe to my Ao3 account or to the Stardust and Storybooks series if you want notifications of when they’re published! 
> 
> 7) If you like what I wrote, come find me on Tumblr (username: clara-oswin-oswald), where I can be found screaming about Whouffle.


End file.
